My Head, Talking About Evolution And The NGSS

I was on HuffPost Live yesterday discussing evolution and the Next Generation Science Standards.

It was a little weird to find myself defending the NGSS, which are actually pretty mediocre overall. The fact, however, is that the standards would be even worse if they omitted important content like evolution.

If standards don’t clearly lay out what about evolution students need to know, they are less likely to learn it and that will make them somewhat less able to understand the world or to pursue scientific study.

What’s puzzling is why NGSS supporters are less willing to acknowledge the same logic when discussing other content.

After all, there’s quite a bit of science that the NGSS include only implicitly or omit altogether. That’s bad for all the same reasons it would be bad to leave out or gloss over evolution!

You can come up with a story about why evolution is essential but so much other content isn’t. But it won’t be a plausible story.